


Tumblings

by callowyn



Category: Novakcest
Genre: Episode: The Usual Suspects (Novakcest), Flash Fic, Gen, High School, MIT Era, Middle School, Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-26
Updated: 2011-10-11
Packaged: 2017-11-02 18:07:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/371850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callowyn/pseuds/callowyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of ficlets inspired by images found on tumblr, primarily preseries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Thirteen Lucky

 

([original post](http://novakcest.tumblr.com/post/10681749255))

  
The kelpie takes three more children before their mother decides to hunt it on its own turf. She hadn’t exactly promised the twins balloons and a clown cake, but it’s not until they’re standing on the lake shore and she hands him an iron knife and an oxygen tank that Jimmy realizes this is how he’s going to spend his thirteenth birthday: muddy water seeping in around the edges of his goggles, his stomach fluttering with that same froth of fear and excitement that hasn’t dissipated since their first real hunt more than a year ago, listening to the sound of his own breath loud and mechanical in the silent water. Their mother glides on ahead, as they’d agreed, and for a while Jimmy is aware only of the cold murk slipping between his fingers, along his body. He has dreams like this sometimes, never able to tell the difference between swimming and flying.  
  
Jacob elbows Jimmy for attention and executes a clumsy backflip, eyes crinkling behind the goggles despite the mask that gets in the way of his smile. Jimmy bubbles a laugh and pokes Jacob’s shoulder, then darts away— _tag, you’re it._ Caught up in the escape, in the cocoon of his self-contained breath, he doesn’t see the dark horse-like creature that rises up beneath him.  
  
The kelpie’s teeth pierce down to the bones of his ankle. Jimmy tries to gasp and chokes on the plastic taste in his mouth, oxygen tank scraping the back of his neck as he’s dragged down through swirls of his own blood. He can’t _see—_  
  
And then his vision fills with Jacob and he snaps back into himself, enough to remember the knife still clutched in one hand. He scores a line across the kelpie’s long face and it pulls away, both of them now staining the water dark. Jimmy imagines he can smell the rotten metallic tang, memories from previous hunts filling in where his nose only sucks uselessly in its plastic mask.  
  
Jacob dives with a look Jimmy has seen too many times, one that’s crossed his own face more than once since they started fighting monsters and the monsters started fighting back. _You hurt my brother. I’ll kill you._  
  
But the kelpie must sense him coming, because just as Jacob nicks its flank it turns and lunges for him, and for one heart-stopping second Jimmy thinks it’s torn out the back of Jacob’s neck. The truth, when he furiously kicks close enough to see it, is almost as bad: Jacob’s mouthpiece has been torn out, the tube in shreds, and a well-placed wrench has the air tank bubbling out. Jacob flails his arms, grasping for the mouthpiece, but his eyes behind the mask are huge. Breathless.  
  
Later Jimmy will learn that his mother emerged from the murk like an avenging angel, firing three iron bolts from a modified crossbow straight into the kelpie’s heart. What he knows at this moment is that Jacob’s never been good at holding his breath, and the kelpie below them is thrashing itself into a frenzy, and Jimmy’s ankle feels stabbed anew with every kick but Jacob can’t breathe and the surface is so very far above them—  
  
And then he has one arm around Jacob’s waist and the other clapping his air supply against his twin’s mouth, and Jacob is alive enough to pull him closer as he takes his first breath.

 


	2. Shotgun Shuts His Cakehole

([original post](http://novakcest.tumblr.com/post/11558470305))  
  
When they were young, sitting shotgun was a punishment. _Don’t make me come back there. Don’t make me separate you._ A trip to the grocery store, the weekly schleps to church, the earliest times Sally packed the trunk with rifles and rocksalt. The game was always to push each other just far enough, annoying without angering, teasing without tempting Mom’s wrath.  
  
That changed, with the same mysterious alchemy that drove Jimmy to find his own table at lunch. Maybe the process had been going on for a long time and Jacob hadn’t noticed, not until they were dragging the bags back to the car after a weekend in Indiana (werewolf, and it hadn’t gone well). “I call shotgun,” Jimmy said, and Jacob didn’t understand. And then there was Jimmy, sitting next to their mother, avoiding his eyes in the rearview mirror. Calling shotgun every time and winning, because Jacob never remembers the impenetrable distance between front seat and back seat until Jimmy chooses it for him. What is Jacob supposed to do, if not strap himself in and ride it out?


	3. Halloween, 1995

  
([original post](http://novakcest.tumblr.com/post/9542386782))  


When they were fifteen, Jimmy saved up to buy himself a really good gangster costume, something that would make everyone glad he’d been invited to the Halloween party this year. He was still studying his reflection, adjusting the lapels of his coat and scooting the overlarge fedora further up on his head, when Jacob rattled down the stairs, apparently ready for his own night of solo trick-or-treating in the grubbiest of their three communal button-downs and his favorite pair of jeans. The only indication that this even formed a costume was the coil of rope tucked over one shoulder.  
  
Jimmy met his brother’s eyes in the mirror. “Who’re you?”  
  
“Indiana _Jones,_ ” Jacob said, with that particular scorn he saved just for Jimmy, and yeah, Jimmy should’ve known—Jacob had watched Raiders of the Lost Ark so many times that even Jimmy could identify it by the opening commercials on the VHS. “Maybe you’ve heard of him.”  
  
Jimmy turned to glare properly and felt the fedora slide back down around his eyebrows.  
  
“I’m gonna get way more candy than you,” Jacob added. He imitated the sound of a whip.  
  
Jimmy suddenly saw how Jacob would look to anyone else, this boy who should’ve outgrown stupid traditions still clinging to a rope that no one would recognize. An itch formed where the hatband pressed against Jimmy’s forehead and the scrape of his fingernails didn’t soothe it. Why hadn’t Jacob left already? Why did he always make Jimmy witness his embarrassments, as though their shared face lifted half the responsibility?  
  
“Here,” said Jimmy’s mouth without permission, and then he was taking the fedora he’d bought with his own money and pushing it onto Jacob’s messy hair and backing away again because personal space actually meant something for them these days. After a moment, Jacob touched the hat like he wasn’t entirely sure that had just happened either.  
  
“Aren’t you gonna need this?”  
  
“Yeah, well, you can’t fight Nazis without a hat.” Jimmy looked down at the trenchcoat, which seemed somehow lighter across his shoulders. “I can be John Constantine. He’s pretty cool.”  
  
“Practically a hunter,” Jacob agreed, and that wasn’t what Jimmy meant but it’d been a while since Jacob grinned without malice so he didn’t say anything, not even when the smile slipped and something else crossed Jacob’s face. But “Coat looks good on you, Jimbo,” and then Jacob was past Jimmy and out the door.  
  
Later Jimmy won’t remember whose house the party was at or whether anyone liked his costume after all; what he does hold on to is the way Jacob tipped Jimmy’s hat as he left, every inch the cocky adventurer, and how for a second there seemed nothing more natural than to follow him.


	4. The Trials and Tribulations of Bobby Singer, Baseball Coach

([original post](http://novakcest.tumblr.com/post/10395898331))

  
“I started it,” says Jacob before they’ve even sat down. Except Jacob’s bleeding lip, you’d never know they’d been in a fight; the same could not be said for the four boys that had ended up in the nurse’s office. Jimmy glances up at Bobby, guilt written in the tight line of his mouth.  
  
“Those are your teammates you just sent to the nurse,” Bobby tells Jimmy. He’s coached baseball a long time, watched this kid go from awkward silences to overloud jokes to actual friendship with the rest of the team, and he’s not fool enough to think that’s got nothing to do with the way Jacob Novak has been getting himself deeper and deeper in trouble, not with how close the twins were only a few years back. But this is the first time he’s seen any sign of that mean streak in Jimmy, and for a second, catching the look on Jimmy’s face as he dragged him off the other boys, Bobby’d been downright scared of the boy.  
  
He sighs and stares the Novak brothers down, wishing for a good stiff drink. “I guess I don’t need to warn you what’ll happen if this happens again.”  
  
“It won’t,” says Jacob, directly to his brother, and adds something in harsh whispers about _get yourself in trouble can fight my own goddamn battles why’d you even bother._  
  
Jimmy looks Bobby in the eye and doesn’t say a single word.


	5. Shuttered

([original post](http://novakcest.tumblr.com/post/9869961680))

 

Jacob’s always been aware of what’s in the clutter covering his desk, no matter how little sense it made to other people, so Joseph shouldn’t be able to hold up a photograph that doesn’t belong there and ask, “What’s this?”  
  
It’s a sucker punch to the gut; it’s a memory out of place; it’s something Jacob thought he’d left behind. He had taken this picture with a camera he found at a church rummage sale, some summer a long time ago: Jimmy at the kitchen table, looking up just as the flash went off, wide-eyed and beginning a smile.  
  
“Man, I know you’re homesick, but I don’t see how a picture of your own self is gonna help,” says Joseph, one eyebrow rising. “Given how you’re still right here.”  
  
Jacob snatches the picture back a little too quickly, lays it face-down. He can still see Jimmy’s face perfectly, the quick grin of recognition he used to take for granted, and he can superimpose that last look of horrified disgust on it just as clearly. It’s not home Jacob’s sick for.  
  
“Stop going through my stuff, asshole,” he says, and pushes the picture deep into the pile of papers, as though replacing it exactly where it was could undo the last two minutes _(the last two years)_.  
  
“This narcissism thing is getting weird,” Joseph mutters, but he must hear something in Jacob’s voice, because five years pass and he doesn’t mention it again.


	6. The Usual Suspects

([original post](http://novakcest.tumblr.com/post/8545179688))

 

 _I’m a Virgo. I like long walks on the beach and double cheeseburgers. And I did not kill anyone._  
  
Detective Diane Ballard hasn’t had this much trouble with a suspect since she joined the force. Even before the Novak twins start passing notes like teenagers in love, they’ve half convinced her that she has their names switched around, then with eerily accurate timing they both reclaim the names they came in with. She finds papers signed Starsky and Hutch, and she tries to remember how that show ended because she’s pretty sure one of them dies.  
  
She doesn’t know which twin holds her wrists and tells her about ghosts, which one brings her along to dig up a girl tossed away like so much trash, which of them was there to see her lose faith in her partner. She doesn’t know who she has to thank for her life.


End file.
